Dawn of the Geeks

I’ve decided to approve all 2400+ comments and turn off moderation. Let’s see what happens.

Long ago people would find things on the internet by typing in domain names related to what they wanted. If you wanted pizza you’d type in PizzaHut.com or Dominos.com. It’s still true to some extent today. This is why coporations pay big bucks to buy the domain or sue the people who own the domains with their trademark.

Once you get past the domain name the focus goes directly to search engines. Especially Google and Yahoo. There are two ways to go about keywords. You can focus on a handful of keywords and try to maximize traffic. Or, you can pile on the content and try to maximize the number of keywords that generate traffic.

Personally I prefer to try to maximize the number of keywords. It takes a lot less time and money to throw an interface around an existing pile of information than to try to fine tune a small piece of information and fight for a top spot.

Getting that pile of information can be difficult. There are free sources such as DMOZ, Wikipedia, RSS feeds, etc. All large amounts of information are initially developed by a community effort. You can try to build your own community to generate content for you or you can take existing information and repackage it.

Either way you need to get people to stay. There’s no point in having gobs of information if people hit the back button the instant they see one of your pages. You may get traffic but you’ll never get any revenue. No matter if your site has a dozen pages or a million, the presentation has to be good or it’s worthless.

The Free Speech Zone is back.

The Free Speech Zone is essentially a dumping ground for whatever you want. You can use HTML links in your posts. All other HTML is stripped. Just enter in a title and your message and you’re off. No accounts, no moderation. As the amount of content grows I’ll rework the interface for browsing existing posts.

You can also comment on existing posts. If you enter in a title that has the same title as an existing post then your comment is added to the existing entry.

Enjoy!

The advantage to content driven web-sites is that Google and other search engines have a lot to work with. The disadvantage of content driven web-sites is that Google and other search engines take time to index them.

DMOZ is an open directory mirror with my own layout applied. The original version I had running for a few years made a little over $1000 with AdSense. The current version is still begging to be indexed. In the process I learned that leaving the adult section visible (dmoz.org hides it, but it’s there) brings you lots of hits, but eventually can cost you a domain that can have AdSense on it. So far it’s made little to nothing in the four months I’ve had it running. In it’s hayday it was making about what FreeRingtoneHeaven.com makes now.

Cubia is a lightweight Wikipedia clone. The search engines have just started going to town on it even though it has been running since April of 2006. The reason is simple: I finally added MediaWiki’s parser to the site. Previously all interwiki links were just question marks. Now the links use the title of the destination as the link text. This makes Google and Yahoo happy. Not looking like absolute trash also helps. In a year and a half it has made around $140. We’ll see how that does going forward.

These sites are examples of lazy web development. It’s taking large amounts of existing free information, putting a palatable front end on it and slapping AdSense on it. There’s no community being utilized, it’s just dropping a boulder on the information super highway and seeing how many people run into it. These types of sites are useful because they can generate income with little effort.

My other pet project World Daily Press is simply an RSS aggregator with the ability to support a community. Visitors can rate and comment anonymously on any of the articles listed. It currently makes zero dollars because there are no ads. I’m going to wait for traffic before I consider ads since various RSS feeds have various rules about ads. It’s not worth the headache to sort out when there is little potential for any profit anyway. It’s another site that recently had a major update which made it more search engine friendly and is currently being indexed.

The Free Speech Zone was an experiment that earned around $70 in the year it was running. Like World Daily Press, users could anonymously comment on things. The difference was that the users generated the articles as well. The spammers loved it. It’s a site I may consider resurrecting. It would be trivial to make a version of WDP which would allow users to create articles rather than getting them automatically from RSS feeds.

CNN reports

The car will cost “less than purchasing a cup of your favorite coffee” to recharge, and use less electricity annually than a refrigerator, according to GM. The Volt should cost less than 2 cents per mile to drive on electricity, GM said, compared with 12 cents a mile on gasoline at a price of $3.60 a gallon.

As the battery begins to run down as the car is in use, a small gasoline engine will turn on and generate enough electricity to drive the car about 300 miles, said GM.

The problem? No price yet. Also, how many gallons are in the tank to get those 300 miles? How long does it take to charge?

As someone who has a 50 mile each way commute every day I’m looking forward to an electric car that can cut overall car ownership costs dramatically. Currently it costs about $14 per day to drive to work. At 2 cents a mile that goes down to $2 a day. That’s quite a bit of money per month I’d be saving.

ars technica has a story about the future of graphics programming. Tim Sweeney, the brains behind Unreal sees a shift from fixed function GPUs to high powered general purpose processors. Instead of using an API such as DirectX or OpenGL which hides a lot of the work from the programmer, you’ll be back to low level pixel plotting.

For years now the advantage of the current crop of graphics cards is that you can get a lot of pixels on the screen much faster. The disadvantage is that you are restricted in how you can render those pixels. But with GPUs picking up speed you’ll be able to get the flexibility and speed.

Bunnies for example is pure software rendering but it runs on the CPU along with who knows what else that the OS has going. With future graphics cards it will be able to run on the GPU which will make it run significantly faster without having to change much or any of the underlying code. When the CPU wants to plot a pixel it has to process the request, translate the request, pass it on through the system to the GPU and the GPU has to process the request and then pass back through the system to the CPU that the task is completed. By coding directly to the GPU you’ll be able to bypass all that nonsense and plot pixels without the middle man.

I can imagine that API’s like OpenGL and DirectX will no longer exist, at least in the their current form, but they will adapt to the new technology. Not too many people who write games know or care to know how to render a triangle with colored vertices, bump mapping, depth mapping, and lighting applied. I only care because I’ve been there and done that and now I want to learn how things work on a lower level.

OpenGL and DirectX will change from an API to a Library with all that mathematical goodness under the hood hidden from the programmer. Currently much of the math is hidden on the graphics card itself and even DirectX/OpenGL doesn’t deal with it.

The potential for software rendering is far greater than hardware rendering. The issue is that the mass market demands games. And to make games the software rendering has to at least look as good as the hardware rendering. And that’s going to take advancements in GPU technology that aren’t quite here yet.

It’ll be interesting to see what lies ahead. In the meantime I’m going to stick to web development for my day job and CPU based software rendering as my hobby.

One of questions many gamers have is “why do you even have lives?” It made sense back in the arcade days because lives cost real money. There was a financial incentive to make the game difficult so you’d die often and have to pop in more quarters. Many modern console games just annoy you if you run out of lives. For example making you go through the whole process of loading up your saved game again.

ACME Arsenal doesn’t have “lives.” You can still die but there are numerous checkpoints throughout the levels so that if you die you don’t lose much time and there’s no real punishment. That I like. Although it can be annoying in some parts where it’s possible to hit a checkpoint and then fall making you choose between killing yourself or working your way back up to the checkpoint. In some cases it’s faster to just kill yourself and get started back at the checkpoint.

The biggest annoyance is found at the tutorial level when you learn how to do double and triple jumps. The double jump is easy. The triple jump requires you figure out what the heck the manual is talking about. You press A twice and then twist the nunchuck a quarter turn left or right. What they don’t make clear is how the nunchuck must be held when doing the twist. You may assume from the illustration and the intended action that you rotate the controller while holding it vertically. That is not the case. You have to hold the controller level and twist your wrist to the side.

One complaint reviewers had was inconsistant behavior when trying to get the character to perform various actions. I’m guessing that was caused by not holding the controller properly. In many games an animation is used to tell you how exactly to move the controller. ACME Arsenal doesn’t do much to help you out.

Until you figure out how to hold the nunchuck and rotate it to perform the triple jump consistantly you’re not going to get very far in the game.

Once you’ve figured out how to work the controls the game is actually pretty fun. One of “cheats” that you may discover on your own quickly is that weapons that are provided by the game to perform a certain task reappear within seconds after picking it up. So you can pick up a gun and stay in the same spot and your ammo count will continue to go up rather quickly. This doesn’t apply to weapons dropped by enemies. In some levels you can find a weapon, wait for a minute or two in the same spot and have hundreds of rounds of ammo and go on a rampage. If you die you lose the weapon and all the ammo and you may not be able to go back and get it again after you make it past some checkpoints.

I picked the game up for about $15 and I’d say it’s worth the money. It’s frustrating to begin with but once you get the hang of it it becomes more entertaining.

The Bunnies site has been updated. One of the features of the game that the site didn’t support was bump mapped and depth mapped walls. There is now a tool available that will allow you to use any tile piece as a bump and/or depth map for any other tile piece.

The client has supported this feature for awhile. I had previously just manually set up a couple test tiles directly in the database.

It would probably be a good idea to put together some sort of manual for this product now. The Bunnies web-site is now fully capable of editing maps for the Bunnies game. The rest of the game development process is going to revolve around making Bunnies fully internet enabled. Currently the server serves only to access map information and download resources. What I’m looking to do next is to allow multiple players to interact when they’re in the same map. The first part of that is implementing a chat interface.

World Daily Press has been updated a bit. Previously the main page allowed you to browse through categories and see all the articles for the current day. There was a seperate archive page that allowed you to browse older articles but didn’t have categories. That seemed silly to me so I finally merged the two. The archive now handles everything. You can browse through the current day and previous days and view only the articles in certain categories. It’s also paginated so you don’t get overloaded with summaries on a single page.

It’s still horribly plain looking (see also: ugly) which may be fixed eventually.